SWTOR : Somewhat Review, and Impressions

Star Wars : The Old Republic (SWTOR for short, or just ToR) is the largely awaited MMORPG developed by Bioware and in some sense, the spiritual successor to Bioware and Obsidian's KOTOR games. It is not just a normal MMORPG either but it does contain many parts of it that does make it a more standard MMORPG akin to World of Warcraft which is basically as standard as you can get nowdays. In any case, there's one big part that separates it from being such a standard MMO and smaller parts that I'll talk about later, however the big part is character interaction.

I believe character interaction is what sets ToR apart from other games and chose it over story because while Bioware advertises this game basically being the forefront of bringing a focus on story to the MMO genre, I'm going to say that's not entirely accurate, MMORPGs like Lord of the Rings Online have had a huge focus on story before ToR, as well as World of Warcraft; however neither of those games had basically any character interaction at all other than your character is talked to by people, and then you do stuff for them. While that idea is still existent in ToR, and it very much is one of the things I like and dislike about the game, every single quest related character in the game is interactable, they are of course interactable on different levels but never the less you are given opportunities to respond to them in 3 different ways which usually sum up to nice, nice or rude depending on what option is given (this option usually always changes from conversation to a different conversation to a different character) and finally just rude. A majority of the time how you respond in most situations will not affect anything too drastically other than getting a different response out of the character but it will still lead to them giving you a quest. On the other hand, there are also light and dark moments where you're given two choices and sometimes three but mostly two, about how to go about a situation, and those choices drastically deliver a consequence somehow. It is unknown by me at least if those choices will actually affect anything later on in the game, the only thing that happens usually is that you get a followup letter from someone involved in a in game mail box who tells you what happened afterward.

All of that above however is just about side quests, there are main quests choices that have similar outcomes but I feel like a choice that is made in the main quest would be more likely to come back in an in game form than a side quest one.

In any case, the interactive characters and the stories that come with that are what makes ToR stand on it's own I believe, that and it being set in the Star Wars universe which brings a very unique experience to allow yourself to be immersed in to begin with. However with that said, I don't believe this game is perfect at all and that probably lies in the game play mechanics. As with most games, the PvE and PvP components are drastically different but most games also do both well, in ToR I feel like the gameplay mechanics server PvE just fine, tank, healer, and DPS serve their purposes just fine, and while it feels like the connection between one attack to another is not instantaneous and more reliant on watching the animation complete rather than being tied to the global cooldown, it isn't that much of a big deal in PvE than it is in PvP. To give an example of the not instantaneous idea, as a Jedi Sentinel I have a skill called Overload Saber, it is suppose to be an instant cast that empowers my lightsabers allowing them to do damage over time effects when they hit, the problem is that it is by no means instantaneous, if I hit the ability and then immediately do an attack afterwards, it will cancel the Overload Saber skill which again isn't very annoying in PvE but if that happens in PvP that would be a problem.

The problem with PvP isn't in the skills persay but it is because of class design and PvP zone design. The first most obvious problem to me anyways is that the game's PvP zone range for Warzones at least which are instanced areas for PvP combat, is that the level range is basically 10-50, 50 being the level cap, it probably goes without saying that entering the warzone is basically pointless at lower levels, but the game does try to balance things out by adjusting everyone's stats to basically the same level. Even still however, a higher level will have more ways and a easier time killing people than a lower level would, I've only done 1 Warzone on my sentinel at about level 20ish and a lot more on my Vanguard who is only level 23 and my experience is that because I'm a ranged class and a tank, I can do much better as a Vanguard than I did with my Sentinel at a low level ,even still however, when I fight a high level it isn't much fun to just die to CC.

So while I haven't admittedly done much in ToR yet these are some of the problems that I've encountered with the game. There is much more things better with the game than there are bad things, however the bad things do mar what would be a great MMO experience for me.

One last thing I'll say about ToR is that I think it is still designed for a very specific audience. If you don't enjoy either Star Wars or games with heavy emphasis on interaction and story, then ToR probably isn't the game for you. It does have the standard MMO components of go out to a area, gather quests, then go complete them, but honestly those almost feel like they hurt the experience more than helping it. It's not a bad thing of course because it allows for a extended multiplayer experience beyond simply character conversations, however at the same time it is somewhat of a real disappointment to be having this interesting conversation with a character, and then the next person you talk to basically just says kill 30 so so things, and collect so so things while you're at it. Nevertheless however, ToR is a excellent game, that I'll be writing more in depth about as I play it more.

Status Update Dec.17,2011

I'm currently trying to figure out the best method to recording videos and editing them for the best viewer experience. Currently I am debating doing whole recordings and then cutting out high lights, or setting a record time to record nonstop and then post the entire thing, unedited. Right now, I'm leaning towards doing the first one, but I might end up doing both depending on the circumstances. Possibly even thinking of some other way to present videos that I haven't thought of even. As of right now though, it's still up in air, but I'm making footage at least.

Chat Interview - Adam Cascio on First Days of The Old Republic on Live

 I was able to get Adam to participate in the first interview I through together mainly to see how interesting it would be, and to also try interviewing someone. So far I'm fairly happy with the results as a lot of information was given as well as getting a few things out of him that I didn't know yet either, plus it's all from him personally, so seeing another view point is good too.

A few things I know I could change however is having a more structured list of questions to start out with, as I started the idea off pretty much as soon as I got it, I wasn't prepared with such a list. I do think I handled myself in a fairly timely manner on getting questions out fast to keep the interview flowing however. Lastly on the same note as timely manner, I believe I should keep on changing the subject to cover a more wide variety of things or at least choose a subject to start off with that isn't as vague as simply "First days in The Old Republic on live". Doing so will allow me to get more information out as well as keep the interview being a interview rather than simply a conversation that follows a thread to another and to another and so on.

Here is the interview however, and I while I don't have too many plans for it in the immediate future, I think I'll definitely figure out some way to implement them easier.

[18:07] Alyssa R.: How long have you been playing in Star Wars : The Old Republic?
[18:07] Adam: Since Tuesday at 6:15 am.
[18:07] Adam: But I played in Beta a few weeks too.
[18:08] Alyssa R.: And generally speaking, is there any MMO or similar game to The Old Republic that you would compare the experience to?
[18:09] Adam: Not really. SWG a little since it's Star Wars as well. But SWG was a sand box MMO, this one is a theme park MMO like WoW. But it plays and feels much differently than WoW.
[18:10] Alyssa R.: I personally am not sure what you mean by, theme park MMORPG, but I have somewhat of an idea of what you mean by sandbox, however what do those terms mean to you?
[18:12] Adam: Theme Park means you have a certain set of attractions to do or see and you're restricted.Like you can't build player cities, you can't craft gear with your own stats, and stuff like that. Theme Park is like WoW where you are continuously told what to do and where to go.
[18:13] Adam: SWG was also all open world PvP, where as in a theme park MMO you have set battlegrounds to go to.
[18:14] Alyssa R.: So in your sense, theme park would be linear and sandbox would be more free form exploring based such as single player games like the Grand Theft Auto series?
[18:14] Adam: Right.
[18:14] Alyssa R.: I see, onto questions about the game experience directly.
[18:15] Alyssa R.: Starting off, what is your current level, class, and faction in the game?
[18:15] Adam: Level 27 Jedi Guardian, Republic.
[18:16] Alyssa R.: I see, I probably would play a Guardian. Although honestly Sentinel looked the most preferable at the start to me at a glance.
[18:16] Alyssa R.: Did anything affect your choice to pick a Guardian?
[18:18] Adam: Sentinel is fun, but it is pure DPS. You don't really have flexibility like you do as a Guardian who can tank or DPS at end game. But Sentinel is the strongest pure DPS class. But I picked Guardian so I would have flexibility at end game and because I like using one saber over two.
[18:19] Alyssa R.: Good enough reasons as any. As guardian is also basically amongst the community known as the iconic Jedi class, how well do you think it lives up to fulfilling the Jedi legacy that people look to Stars Wars for?
[18:19] Adam: But there are a ton of guardians on my server, so it would probably be good to pick a sentinel.
[18:21] Adam: So far it lives up to it a great deal, you can feel pretty heroic jumping in and getting the attention of the enemies around you. Or force pushing away enemies that are attacking a friend. Force push seems to knock back the enemy 15-20m, so its pretty impressive. And your saber animation can block in any direction and deflect blaster bolts so it looks pretty fluid and neat.
[18:21] Alyssa R.: Based off your knowledge of the game currently, do you know if the Sentinel is able to do these as well or is it specific to the Guardian?
[18:23] Adam: I don't think Sentinel can force push, at least not as early on as the Guardian. I'm pretty sure the Sentinel gets a sabre throw early on, my Guardian doesn't have it yet. The Sentinel focuses on switching sabre styles and using Damage Over Time abilities to do damage over force powers.
[18:23] Alyssa R.: Would that mean the Guardian is more focused on burst and direct damage than the Sentinel is?
[18:25] Adam: I would say that yes, but the sentinel has 3 trees for damage so some may be more bursty over others.
[18:25] Alyssa R.: That may be true of course. Lastly on the topic of classes what role are you currently playing and specialized in as your Guardian?
[18:26] Adam: I am leveling up in the defense tree as a tank.
[18:27] Alyssa R.: How vastly different would you say your play style would have to be if you were leveling up in the DPS tree instead? Outside of the standard group mechanics that of course come with being a DPS or tank, primarily would you be using different abilities often other than what you're currently doing?
[18:29] Adam: Not too much different, in the pure DPS tree you would do more damage as a Guardian but even the tanks in this game do a fair amount of damage. You just have a good bit more survivability. You can also "guard" players in PvP to take damage off them, as well as using taunt in PvP to minimize damage to other players.
[18:30] Alyssa R.: Very interesting, also one more question on the topic of classes before we move on and it just came to me.
[18:30] Adam: Yes?
[18:30] Alyssa R.: What are you looking forward to seeing more of as a Jedi Guardian game play wise? more damaging skills? utility skills? that sort of thing.
[18:31] Alyssa R.: As you level up that is.
[18:31] Adam: Uhhh hmm... I guess seeing what kind of new force powers I get and how well I can horde off enemies and protect people. I'm more interested in the story though I guess.
[18:33] Alyssa R.: As am I. Moving onto that aspect in fact, thus far how interesting has the story been? And how well does it mix in with the game still being a MMORPG rather than just simply a single player RPG.
[18:34] Adam: The Jedi Knight story line is pretty excellent. Your story does change if you make dark side or light side choices as I have experienced both paths up to level 30. And it mixes into MMO by if you are in a group other players can interact in conversations and affect the out come of quests and those decisions stay with you. So it adds a bit of realistic randomness that you would get from traveling in a group of different personalities and motives.
[18:36] Alyssa R.: As I personally have talked to you about this aspect numerous times I apologize for doing it again, however do you see people being in a group together while questing being undesirable for some unless the group happens to be a couple of friends? as opposed to random people.
[18:37] Adam: Yes, if you are playing a mix of both light and dark choices then people who only play for Dark Side or for just Light Side points would probably mess up the RP choices you want to make. It's happened to me once in Live.
[18:38] Alyssa R.: Would you be able to retell that experience without giving too much of the story element away?
[18:41] Adam: You get information about someone allying themselves with criminals temporarily to do something good. The light side option is to turn this person in, the dark side option is to let the person go. I wanted to let her go because while what she did was wrong, her motivations were pure and she said she would make up for her mistake. but my team mate won the roll and turned her in
[18:41] Adam: Its a side quest and not a main story quest, but still affects things
[18:42] Alyssa R.: You later on had the choice that your team mate come back to you in someway?
[18:42] Adam: Not yet, sometimes things don't happen til much later. I only got an in game mail updating me on the situation so far.
[18:43] Alyssa R.: And that email definitely did say that the person involved was turned in?
[18:43] Alyssa R.: well not email, in game mail rather.
[18:45] Adam: Yes. It did, it didn't register my dark side decision.
[18:47] Alyssa R.: That seems like a very interesting way that SWToR did things, it'll definitely deter some people away from grouping, but only time will tell. Moving on however, speaking about decisions, how logical are the dark side and light side choices in the game? Just from your example and my limited experience in the Beta myself, it seems like the game walks either a very obvious good and evil path but then when it gets to a grey decision, it's almost like someone at Bioware couldn't figure out which to put onto light or dark, so they just flipped a coin to sort it out.
[18:47] Alyssa R.: What do you think?
[18:51] Adam: The dark side and light side choices seem to go with "whats better for you" or "whats better for the people" or "whats better for the republic" or "whats the most sadistic". I think they are pretty spot on on whats dark or light. Just because something is dark sided doesn't mean it isn't the right thing to do.
[18:52] Alyssa R.: So if someone wanted to play a good character, they should do what they think is right rather than simply following light sided decisions?
[18:53] Adam: Right, that's what I've been doing.
[18:53] Alyssa R.: and how are your light sided and dark sided totals looking?
[19:01] Adam: I have 2200 light side and like 200 dark side I think
[19:02] Alyssa R.: Well it still registers light side being as the primary good side then I suppose. Also I think that'll do it for the interview. We'll talk more about the world and more standard MMO things that the game has later. Do you have anything else you'd like to add?
[19:07] Adam: No, I think that about covers it.
[19:07] Alyssa R.: Alright then. Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you in game soon.

Future Plans for the Blog

I know it's been quite a few months now since I've started the blog on September and I haven't done a lot with it, but the truth is I just can't figure out what would be at the same time, the most fun for me, as well as the most interesting for viewers. Doing basically "whatever" seemed like a good idea at the time for awhile, but it just didn't produce many results for a number of reasons. Be it my own laziness or the fact that I really had nothing interesting to write about, whatever the case is or was, it prevented me from getting as much done as I'd like. So, to that end, I will be doing some experimenting especially now that I have more options at my disposal to produce more interesting content. One of the ideas I had was to do a format similar to how the Totally Rad Show does it's production with presenting a segment everyday of the week which allows for things to be more spread out, at the same time though however, they have a structured system of progression through the week as well as permanent segments that are usually always included in their show such as a game review on tuesday, and movie review on thursday and so on.

As I don't really have a wide enough variety of interests to cover an entire week with something new, I don't know if that will be more of a deterrent to that sort of plan or not. However at the very least I will be trying to do more organized content instead of randomly putting down my thoughts on random things, however at the same time, I still will be having a somewhat large degree of me writing about my opinions on a topic that I think is interesting. For now though, to start off with a bang on doing new ideas as they come to me, I will start working on something for today that I will release later on. With that said, look forward to new changes to the blog, and hopefully a brighter future for it as well.

Another Return Post

As you may have noticed there is a considerable gap between the dates of my last post and this one, that is unfortunately because I haven't really had much to write about due to the things that I was mainly doing. That being World of Warcraft, Employment, and Shopping. Well actually now that I think about it, all of those would make for good short topics so I'll see what I can do.

Shopping - As many people know there's definitely a area for gaming entertainment now days with how easy many video streaming services have made it for people to just download a program and fire away, however that still does have a technology limitation and I haven't been able to do it. I went shopping originally for a computer that would allow me to play Star Wars : The Old Republic well, as due to me finding out a different way, my current computer didn't cut it. However at the same time with a new computer doesn't just come a new game, it comes pretty much a whole new experience, and as a side benefit I am now able to produce more interesting forms of content as well as probably playing The Old Republic, which I haven't tested well, but I'll be doing that soon enough.

World of Warcraft - Alice and I have had a few ups and downs with World of Warcraft in the short time that we came back to it. The general game experience was very fun, however at the same time it was very easy, and the community still hasn't improved much at all. I would in fact say that the community degraded further, but in any case going back to something that we have a considerable amount of experience with, I've been playing since release, and Alice during the end of the initial release as the game was moving onto The Burning Crusade, was exceptionally fun. We estimated about 6 months of being away from World of Warcraft, and pretty much everything about the game felt new again but at the same time old, another plus to that was that we were playing new classes that we both had experience in from being former mains or alts but not much real long lasting experience that we could depend on. So while we both knew what the classes were capable of, we were free to explore and enjoy all of the changes to the classes that happened while we were gone. Another plus to that end was that we were playing on the Horde side whereas we were formerly Alliance on our previous server. While we both have Horde experience in previous expansions, it was our first time seriously playing as a member of Horde after The Shattering. Basically that meant we had completely new quests to play through up until the Outlands, which was fun for us, but we both don't like the Outlands after the Burning Crusade was over, as it just wasn't really fun to blaze through, but it was fun to level normally in; that therein lies the problem, pretty much everyone in the entire world will want to blaze through content they've already done in a game, and we're no exception.

While questing was fun, that wasn't the only thing that we participated in during our return; the others mainly being Instances and Battlegrounds (BGs), those two kind of led to a problem for me. Starting with BGs as that is the lesser culprit between the those two; basically I had no problems with BGs as they were largely the same as I remembered them even at low levels, at the same time however there was basically a deal breaking problem that we quickly found out, and that was Heirlooms. Most BGs consisted of both sides having an excessive amount of heirloom equipped players making them harder to kill than they should have been, but honestly I didn't have much of a problem with that, I did have a problem with it at the same time though because the people who really went all out on gearing themselves out with heirlooms have the fact to show off that they're basically not only invincible but also can do an abnormally high amount of damage. Basically in short it depends on how geared out a player wanted themselves to be, and in most cases as with everything in multiplayer RPGs, the answer is as much as possible. Even so with that said, there still wasn't that much of a threat from the majority of heirloomed players, I would say in most 10 versus 10 BGs, you'll see maybe 1 or 2 really geared out people, and  5-9 or even more, people with just one or two pieces of heirloom equipment. In short, heirlooms broke any sort of chance for people to go into BGs without heirlooms and have an enjoyable experience, because no matter how you are, if someone can one or two shot you, you will end up short.

Dungeons are a whole different story, I generally liked and hated the dungeons at the same time as we did. Starting off with the likes, I loved the dungeons put simply when everything goes off without a hitch; I've always loved clearing dungeons as fast as possible regardless of how difficult it is, and being able to practice my group skill as a Protection Warrior. Obtaining upgrades is also another bonus of course with participating in Dungeons, and more often than not, when a Plate item dropped, as I was the only Plate wearer, I got it; things weren't as easy for Alice most of the time, but we still managed to get a majority of the drops that we wanted to get. Finally the fact that all dungeons at least pre-Burning Crusade received a make over to allow them to be shorter and more linear if they were not, really made it feel like a completely new experience, for example I've done Maraudon plenty of times and have gotten lost in it just as many, but with the aid of the Looking for Group and new Dungeon Systems, you start off at one of the entrances like you always have when doing Maraudon, however Blizzard has moved a few bosses around to make for a more suitable length between trash monsters and bosses. They've also done that for another reason, because they've effectively divided Maraudon into 3 parts, while it has always been that way due to the player base creating it as so, Blizzarrd has aided by making a sort of an invisible wall, not a literal one though, but in the sense that there is a boss that is very hard to miss and when you kill him, you receive the "end of dungeon" reward that you receive for clearing a dungeon out normally. That essentially meas there's no reason to continue forward unless your group wanted to do it, and it shortens the length of a "full" run by two thirds. Blizzard has also added more or new quest dialog to the dungeon quests as well as making them nearly impossible to miss, being that a majority of quest givers will be right at the start of the instance, inside of the instance, I personally like reading quests, so that was another plus for me. After saying all of that, you might think how could I dislike anything about it? well that'll be because of the other group members that we were forced to go with.

I am not someone who would say that all random group members are immediately bad, however at the same time, I am someone who would want to not group with them so I wouldn't have to deal with that possibility, because more than not, it ends up being true. In honesty however I would say bad groups only consisted of 10% of all of the dungeons Alice and I did while we were playing World of Warcraft. 10% however when speaking of things that could possibly ruin a 20 minute to an hour or more long experience, is still a very high number, and while I might be overstating it, regardless of how high the actual percentage is, it was a problem that was hard to remedy. Even with the voting system in place, people tend to not want to kick other people unless they have a reason to directly dislike them, even if the offender is being trouble for another person in the group, and that makes getting rid of poisonous players hard. So, basically when we had a problem with a group member, we just ended up leaving the instance, because I didn't want to deal with hitting my head against a wall in a pointless argument against them. Even so, the aftereffects of having to deal with such a player is the opposite of what I consider fun in every way, and while I thought about listing off a few of the actions the players that I dislike did, I think this part of the post is already negative enough, so if anyone wants to know, message me and I'll talk about it.

With all of that said, even if a 10% is a lot for negative players, 90% is still much greater, and generally I enjoyed tanking and burning through the dungeons of World of Warcraft. Oh, one thing that I've neglected to mention because it doesn't fit in either category of like or dislike, is that the dungeons basically are excessively easy. In terms of getting as much XP as fast as possible it's a godsend, however in terms of actually improving people's skills, it really doesn't help at all when you probably could clear the dungeon in a timely manner with all damage dealers using auto attacks, and the healer using a renew or some sort of healing over time spell. Also while that example might be overkill, it isn't too far off from the current difficulty level of dungeons, although that may be because I was playing a warrior tank, and with multiple enemies hitting me, and thus increasing my attack power, I'm able to contribute a very high amount of damage to all normal "trash" pulls. Thus getting through the instance very quickly, but I can't imagine it's too different for the other types of tanks since everyone has their own form of powerful area of effect spells, just for the occasion of being able to hold threat on multiple enemies during a pull.

Last but not least there's the topic of me being employed, but as of right now it's not much to talk about, and I can't figure out what to write, but I will be posting somethings up about that later on.

Anyways, this is my returning post as well as the start of new things that I'll be trying to do for the blog, I still haven't registered a domain name which I should get on soon, but due to the circumstances I now find myself in, I'll be able to provide more interesting things to not only read, but watch soon as well.

Our Return to World of Warcraft

fter some long and hard debating, Alice and I have returned to the World of Warcraft. We had a number of reasons for thinking about doing so, and it started from talking about how Mists of Pandaria didn't make sense oddly enough, but then it also brought up that Blizzard might also be improving on the aspects of WoW that we liked, so we ended up trying to look for some trials we didn't use to see how the game would be after so much time passed. We had some trials that Blizzard sent out for the release of 4.2 however when I tried to activate mine it turns out that the link wasn't existent anymore, so we didn't have anything else to fallback on other than that. That led us to purchasing a full 1 month subscription and using the Scroll of Resurrection on me where I will also purchase 1 month during that time. In any case, that leads us to where we are today and why I haven't posted much, we've been changing our regular games quite frequently now but as of now, we're back in WoW. These are basically a few things of what we've done so far.

-Leveled to 19 on new mains, I am a Goblin Warrior, and Alice is a Goblin Mage

-Fished up Ol' Crafty again in Orgrimmar which was really lucky on my part

-Found out that while Blizzard seems to have cut back on “twinks” (player characters that basically have the best equipment in a lower than endgame level) they also seemed to have enforced/supported twinks at the same time through Heirloom equipment.-

-Found out that Bind on Account items cannot be sent across servers

-Were astounded by a member of a random dungeon group we were grouped with which I won't go into further detail about at the moment, but may possibly later

-Were able to see the improvements on the Goblin starting zone from the beta, mostly in that they added a cut scene, and they fixed the “Town-in-a-box” which used to literally be surrounded by an invisible wall, making it impossible to get in without managing to climb the wall

-Lastly we quested farther than we have in the past on the post Cataclysm Horde side, our previous highest levels before then were 73 Paladins.

So far I'm really liking the quest lines because it's interesting to see how some characters are warlike like Garrosh or more civilized and “new Hordelike”, the ones that were basically more like Thrall and to an extent, Grom Hellscream, and I'm interested to see how the quests will progress and if the two distinct faces of the Horde will clash, I've heard about the Thunder Bluff predicament of course, but other than that I'm pretty much unaware of there will be any more tension within the horde.

That about wraps up what we've been doing lately, we will still also be involved with League of Legends to an extent, but we've added World of Warcraft into the games that we're primarily playing right now.

Grand Theft Auto 5 - First Trailer (with speculation)

I never really followed or saw much Grand Theft Auto news for the past few years and I was surprised by it considering that usually when a new extremely popular game comes out or is announced, I usually can't stop hearing more of it even if I tried. I only recently found out why there was that lack of existence, because there really wasn't much existing to talk about at all, Grand Theft Auto 5 was only heavily speculated and rumored, at least until now. Rockstar announced that Grand Theft Auto 5 is actually in development and today they released the first trailer for the game.

I've had different feelings about it's predecessor, Grand Theft Auto 4, and even games that came before it did in the series; games such as Grand Theft Auto 3, San Andreas, Vice City or even 2 before all of those. There was a noticeable shift in the entire series at a few points in it's life time, the first being of course the shift from old generation consoles ending with GTA 2 and moving onto 3 at which point the game went onto being 3D and had a more cinematic presentation and somewhat more streamlined flow rather than go where ever you want and do missions for whoever you want (although you could still almost go where ever you want). In any case however, the series continued basically the same way with a few minor improvements in Vice City, and then started to show signs of change in San Andreas with various inclusions such as appearance customization, and including RPG elements such as gaining levels in skills. After San Andreas however, GTA went back to it's roots basically with GTA 4, not only taking place in the same city that GTA 3 did, but also almost mechanically as well. GTA 4, while very polished, refined, and definitely the next level up in the GTA series, reminded me of playing GTA 3 in that it seemed much more clunky than Vice City or San Andreas, although after playing the game for a long period of time, I decided that that “chunkiness” was just the game being GTA 4, and it intentionally provides a weight to everything for a sense of realism even to the extent of it's realism getting in the way of what you wanted to do in a GTA game, much like it would do in reality. With all of that said, that finally leads us to GTA 5.

I believe GTA 5 will continue the tradition of showing the change in the GTA series from just how Rockstar has improved on their implementation and utilization on the Euphoria engine between the time period of GTA 4 and Red Dead Redemption. If you've played RDR and also have played GTA 4, you can immediately spot the differences and similarities in game play, from how movement is more fluid and less dragged on by weight in RDR, to how the shooting mechanics are just in general way more improved and easier to use in RDR as well. With the lessons learned (or created) in RDR, I feel like if Rockstar carries that onto GTA 5, it would end up being a massive difference from GTA 4, however at the same time there's a possibility they won't do that at all because it would separate the two feelings of both games too much, but only time will tell.

As for the actual trailer, if you haven't seen it yet, you can find a link to it below here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkkoHAzjnUs

The trailer itself looks much more like the few things that I've seen from Max Payne 3 stylistically more than GTA 4. The video just seems much more bright and colorful than in has in the past. Although that may just be the improvement of graphics, as even RDR had a sense of being colorful, moreso than GTA 4. There has also been some talk of speculation that I heard from Adam who he heard from other people that speculated things such as :

-The main character is Tommy Vercetti from Grand Theft Auto : Vice City

-Niko Bellic is in the trailer as a homeless man

-CJ/Carl Johnson would have a part

-There are multiple playable characters

My take on those is that for the first one, I wouldn't mind if Tommy Vercetti was the main character as I really liked Vice City even though my liking of the character Tommy Vercetti was somewhat questionable. Although according to the trailer, if the narration voice is indeed him, then he has at least slightly changed for the better. For Niko Bellic being the homeless man shown in the trailer, I don't think that he honestly looks much like Niko at all, of course he is wearing the same outfit that Niko starts out with in GTA 4, and if the game takes 20 years after GTA 4, then it would be possible as he would probably not be easily recognizable. As the game takes place in San Andreas (apparently) it would only make sense to have the main character of San Andreas have some role in the story or at least make a brief appearance. Finally as for the multiple playable characters, after hearing that Tommy Vercetti would be the main character, I'm actually against that because I want to see how he has changed throughout the years and spending the entire game as him and seeing his view point the entire way through would be a suitable way to do that.

Finally, I still don't have that many real expectations for GTA 5 other than the one that of course many other people will have, that the game will be good if not superb. However, I do have one speculation or hope of my own that is based off the hearsay that Tommy Vercetti is the main character. If he does take that role, I would like to see mention or involvement of the other characters in Vice City that were involved with him in someway. Of course, that part should go without question anyway as the other characters were essential in Tommy Vercetti's role throughout Vice City. As I said before though, only time will tell what GTA 5 ends up becoming and if any of the speculation is true at all. With that said, the trailer made me excited for the game, and I will definitely want to play it sometime after whenever it releases.

Irelia - The Floating Blade Master

Recently Alice and I have switched our priority from focusing on trying out new champions and testing Dominion out back to trying out Classic games however that is proving more difficult than we thought but we're still focusing on that primarily rather than Dominion. However I managed to make some time for practicing Irelia in Dominion as well when Alice isn't able to play.

I first had the idea to try her out a long time ago before I knew a lot about the game and I wanted to switch to a melee champion rather than trying out various ranged champions, and she was the most appealing to me as her outfit wasn't very risque, and I hardly ever saw her in action. I ended up not purchasing her however and instead I bought cheaper champions to try out. Actually I think I just bought Akali instead, what actually happened escapes me at the moment. However, since then I still didn't really see much of Irelia in Classic mode, I think I only saw her once or twice in fact, but that changed when Dominion came out. I'm pretty sure the first Dominion game I played when it was still in the open Beta phase, had someone playing Irelia in it, as well as a few of the games after that. The Irelia trend continued onto nowadays and while I see her less frequently, she is still around quite often in Dominion, and far more than she is in Classic.

This week, or rather the last week now, had Irelia as one of the free champions in the rotation and I decided to try her out, I first practiced using her in a custom match with just me and bots just so I could get used to her abilities and how she would perform with a full item build. During that I also decided to mess around to see her death animation which I read about, which is actually probably one of the most shocking deaths in the game, similar to Trynadamere's. Back onto the main point however, I started off with using a Mobafire build that used :

-Mercury’s Treads

-Trinity Force

-Force of Nature

-Shurelya's Reverie

-Randuin's Omen

-Guardian Angel

I personally thought that it both made sense and was completely otherworldly. For supporting it, based off of her skill set, she is very much centered around having DPS, and more durability than most other Assassins do, while other Assassins have extra damage skills whereas Irelia has a passive healing ability through her Hiten Style, and a sort of damaging healing skill through Transcendent Blades. So in short, due to her additional survivability and already good damage, all of the defensive oriented items would compliment that.

Against the build however is the fact that she is still a damage dealer and not a tank, Trinity Force is literally the only item in the build that increases her damage, and while it does do that, it also naturally spreads all of it's effectiveness into all stats including additional defensive ones, which, with all of the other defensive items, I doubt she is in dire need of.

When I tried this build out in Dominion I wasn't able to make any item after the Trinity Force pretty much because the game ended so quickly, although I'm sure that with a more complete build it would be much more viable than I saw it was, I need to do more testing on that in the future.

Back on track however, I found out a few things about Irelia in that custom game, one is that she does quite a bit of burst damage even with the survivability build, two is that her auto attacking damage even with Hiten Style is nearly nonexistent with that build, and three, Irelia's abilities seem to be focused on being able to get into the fight quickly and then unlike other champions, it doesn't really have a clear path from then on, she can lock enemies down but only if they're at higher health than her, she can heal off enemies and hit multiple targets with her Transcendent Blades, and finally she can of course, just auto attack away. All of these things and trying out the defensive build in a Dominion match led me to believe that another build is in order, one with more offense.

I found that quickly too of course, just below a few of the more popular guides which had the survivability build which does make me think that it's viable somehow, probably much more in Classic mode than Dominion. In any case however, this is the offensive build, and the build that I'm currently liking and using the most.

-Mercury’s Treads or Ninja Tabi depending on enemy team composition

-Trinity Force

-Stark's Fervor

-Infinity Edge

-Banshee's Veil/Odyn's Veil

-Phantom Dancer or Guardian Angel or the Black Cleaver or Hextech Revolver

For Dominion I personally switched it around to this order, with a slight modification in items.

-Mercery's Treads or Ninja Tabi

-Trinity Force

-Infinity Edge

-Defensive item based on enemy team (usually I ended up getting a Randuin's Omen)

-Stark's Fervor

-Hextech Gunblade

Of course, I hardly was able to get past the Infinity Edge in most cases, gold always seems to be a problem in Dominion and I need to figure out if that's possible to rectify somehow, maybe through minion farming. In any case however, the Infinity Edge allows Irelia to be a very good auto attacker after charging into battle, everything else that's different from the survivability build such as Stark's Fervor or Hextech Gunblade is designed to work with Irelia's healing ability, which requires her to be in melee combat anyway, so adding more life steal or spell vamp even increases her healing ability even more. The survivability build however is much tougher than this build, although this build in most cases allows Irelia to win 1v1s easily, and with a good team backing her up, she can easily win more numerous fights as well with her high burst and locking down abilities, at the very least at least 90% of the time if you target someone who isn't very durable like a Ranged Carry, they'll die in split seconds as is the goal of all Assassin characters.

Anyways it is difficult to build upon Irelia's character because her skill set allows her to do multiple things but none of them exceedingly well, such as how Trynadamere's abilities allow him to be a better auto attacker along with survivability, or how LeBlanc's skillset is focused on doing high magical damage burst with some escaping power. Irelia on the other hand as Hiten Style which allows her to auto attack more effectively, Bladesurge which is a good farming tool as it refunds mana if it kills something and resets it's cooldown, it's more commonly used as a gap closer though and it also does a high amount of AD damage. Then there's her passive which reduces the durations of crowd control effects on herself, depending on how many enemy champions are nearby, starting at 10% for 1 then 25% for 2, and finally 40% for 3. She also has Equilibrium Strike which does a high amount of damage except it has a AP modifier, and it also slows the target, or if they have a higher health percentage than Irelia, it stuns them instead, and it's duration of both effects increases as it's leveled up. Finally Transcendent Blades do somewhat low base damage but to further emphasize the point that Irelia is hard to itemize, it has both a AD and AP modifier, so if she has a lot of both, then her Transcendent Blades will do quite a bit of damage, it also heals her for 25% of the damage it does to enemy champions, or 10% to enemy minions, and passes through enemies, I personally like this ability a lot once I figured out how to use it because it's good enough to be a ranged ability almost for a melee character, not to the extent of Gangplank's Parrrley, but it's close to being just as good, it's probably more useful too as it also heals whereas Parrrley does not.

So in short, Irelia can be confusing to build since she can use almost every stat well, more so than many other characters, what I've learned and just thought of now is that every time a character comes along with a situation like that such as Jax, the solution is to give them hybrid items which I haven't tried out yet, but I think I'll try it out now before the free rotation ends.

As for wrapping this post up, Irelia is a very good champion to use in Dominion and is somewhat similar to Jax or Xin Zhao in how she functions in the game mode. As with most champions, the real solution to using her well I think in Dominion lies with her item build, and while I haven't tested out the survivability build much, the offensive build works fine and it's time without Infinity Edge is noticeable but it's not dreadful like other champions who use it. So, if you like an Assassin Champion that can be built many different ways even into an off tank apparently, as well as one that has a good gap closer, and offensive skills, then Irelia fits all of those roles and can be quite a fun champion to play in general.

Jarvan IV, The Prince of Dominion?

Not quite in my opinion. After doing some more build testing and research into item builds for Jarvan and then proceeding to test him out on Dominion, I've had somewhat more successful results than yesterday's trial but they still were not spectacular.

The first and foremost thing I tried out was building Jarvan pure DPS first focusing on a build very similar to one that I used to Trynadamere or Garen which included these items but not in this particular order.

1. Berserker's Greaves
2. Atma's Impaler
3. Infinity Edge
4. The Brutalizer
5. The Black Cleaver
6. Phantom Dancer

It became apparent to me however that it wasn't working as well as I hoped, as not only did it take quite awhile to build up to it's full power, it was only at that point where Jarvan IV actually became only somewhat good, even with 5/6 of the items listed (I believe the only one I wasn't able to purchase before the game ended was The Black Cleaver) I still couldn't really hold a candle up to a true DPS character. So while it takes a very long time to reach a point where Jarvan actually does good damage, normal DPS characters such as Master Yi or Trynadamere start to see results after purchasing Infinity Edge or a Phantom Dancer, and hardly anything else, everything else onward only makes them stronger, but the point where they can really start to shine is after one of those mentioned items. With the disappointment of the DPS build aside (although in it's defense I hardly tested it out on more than 3 games before marking it as a lost cause as I can't really see any future testing producing different results) I persevered and moved onto the more defensive oriented builds.

I had the idea to try him out as more defensive oriented after thinking about what kind of tanks worked in Dominion, I did try him out as a offtank once but I really didn't understand his character all that well at the time, and I believe it was around when I first started playing him, so I gave it another shot. To me, I believe nearly all characters can be successful in Dominion with differing challenges because all characters are not built for Dominion and are instead built with Classic mode in mind, so Dominion requires at least a few changes somewhere, although some characters require more change than others. Tanks are a good example of this, due to the small conflict nature of Dominion I don't believe any tank that does not have a taunt should actually build themselves as a full tank as the entire point of a full tank is to take the brunt of a assault for a group, but rarely is there actually a “group” to take damage for in Dominion. Tanks in general need other people around to be effective, they are most effective in League of Legends of course in a 5v5 scenario or even 4v4, however that diminishes as the conflicts get smaller such as in a 3v3 where if I saw a main tank and I was not forced to attack him someway, and I had multiple ways to get around him, I would definitely do so even if that tank entered combat first, if they build purely as a tank they will hardly produce any actual threat compared to their team mates. So, in short I believe if a tank does not have a taunt they do not have a surefire way of actually tanking for anybody, tauntless tanks in 4v4s or 5v5s function because they are able to cause enough havoc to lure people to focusing them anyway and furthermore in the Classic modes' maps, it is harder to get around them. I won't say that it's impossible to play a full tank without a taunt however, as there are a few exceptions where you can force enemies to attack you, mainly involving CC, but even then for characters such as Cho'gath or Jarvan (especially in this case) where they are tanks because they can go into 5 people and be a actual threat as well as take a bunch of damage, they can easily be sidestepped in Dominion in favor of killing their allies.

One role that full tanks can excell at in Dominion however is holding towers but even then there are DPS characters who can also do the role very well too, but they are more susceptible to tower diving than a full tank would be. So, while I believe main tanks aren't totally viable in every situation Dominion can throw at them, I had the idea to try out offtanking.

Offtanking would allow one to basically get the best of both worlds if they wanted to play a character that was specifically suited towards a tanking role as Jarvan is, and still be suitable for Dominion. He is pretty much purely an initiator, his CC and initiation skills can easily turn the tide of a fight or give the upper hand to the team that initiates at the start, the problem is getting to a point where that would be possible in Dominion. To counter the small group combat issue for a tank, the tank must have a bigger presence in the fight that would still allow him to tank to an extent, giving them DPS items and building them almost half and half allows that to happen. The smaller amount of players in combat also offsets the lack of defensive items to a degree as while a main tank would potentially be taking the damage from five people, in a smaller encounter, an offtank would only be taking the damage of one, two , or three usually.

So with that said, the best build thus far I've found for using Jarvan IV in a Dominion game is an offtank build consisting of :

1. Berserker's Greaves
2. Trinity Force
3. Youmuu's Ghostblade
4. Randuin's Omen
5. Odyn's Veil
6. Atma's Impaler

Jarvan can really start to shine after getting Trinity Force in his offtank role, and from experience from that point on when I entered a fight with at least 1 team mate, we would either end up winning or killing or heavily injuring 2 of them depending on how many we were fighting against. His performance DPSwise only improves from that point with a Youmuu's Ghostblade that pretty much will let him win any 1v1 encounter with a non-melee carry, although even then if you did engage a melee carry at this point you probably could win with some ability usage, plus possibly exhaust. I start building on his defensive side again afterward to allow his current damage to be able to overtake any enemy as they won't be able to keep up with his superior defensive power while still dishing out some damage. Randuin's Omen seems to be a good all around choice as it adds plenty of anti AD capabilities,, and to round him out Odyn's Veil afterward takes care of AP users. Finally to add a bit more offense and defense, Atma's Impaler is always good for that. Of course items are subject to change depending on the enemy team, like for example if they happened to be all AD I would not get a Odyn's Veil and probably replace it with Thornmail.

All in all Jarvan IV can work in Dominion and can work well but he's not exactly the easiest champion to pick up and play in fact he's far from it in this game mode. He is very very dependent on his team, and of the characters I've played thus far, I would say that he is the most dependent on his team in order to do well. This isn't too different than in Classic mode however apparently as Jarvan is also very dependent on this team there as well, but due to how often team fights happen there it isn't as bad as Dominion for Jarvan where if he doesn't enter a fight with a team mate, he is at a severe disadvantage. That isn't to say he isn't a completely unfun champion to play as he has a very unique play style compared to most other champions and can be a game changer against other game changers in Dominion if used properly. From being able to disable an entire attacking force on a tower to using his Cataclysm to his team's advantage, I can't emphasize enough how dependent he is on his team mates, but with a good team I would say he is not only a blast to play but also a great boon to the team that he's on.

The Prince Part 2

I was able to do a few games with Jarvan IV in League of Legends but it's quite honestly somewhat demoralizing at least in Dominion. I don't really understand why but I've lost every game since I started playing Jarvan in Dominion, in most of them I feel like I did fairly well sticking to what I believe are his strengths which are to initiate fights so I always tried to be with a team mate when possible, as well as taking hits for them, and defending nodes because to me, his Ultimate, Cataclysm is perfect for getting rid of attackers since it is able to trap them within turret range where the turret will easily finish them off along with your attacks. Despite that, I found that Jarvan IV is not good at 1v1s in any situation unless it's against a ranged AD carry or a Mage, in which case he has superior mobility in almost every way; however against another meleer no matter how I tried to build him, it doesn't seem like his damage output can rival other off-tank DPS characters such as Jax or Sion, in fact his damage doesn't even come close to those two in particular, but then again it might be more of my problem in that I don't really know how to build him.

As for item builds I tried out a few different things from using a standard guide build which suits him for a initiator role with things like Mercury’s Treads, Warmog's Armor, Trinity Force, Atma's Impaler, Banshee's Veil (or Odyn's Veil), and Youmuu's Ghost Blade. I found out that this doesn't seem to work out that well in Dominion because as much as I try, there will always be times when I'm forced into a 1v1 scenario, and as I can't really get my full build, it's hard to see if it's truly efficient or not, but with half a build usually, I end up losing in that situation.

I tried to move onto one with my own alterations building a Trinity Force, Mercury’s Treads, Phantom Dancer, and Youmuu's Ghostblade before the match ended. This gave Jarvan a good amount of everything from Trinity Force as always, some Magic Resistance and Tenacity from Mercury's Treads, Attack Speed and Critical Strike Chance from Phantom Dancer, and finally I personally haven't ever really had successful results from Youmuu's Ghostblade except for on Trynadamere, but I decided to try that out anyway. When I felt like things were going in our favor, as there actually was a enemy Jarvan IV in this game and I was doing far better than him for most of the game, we ended up losing again. On the other hand, I found out that Jarvan can Critical Hit just as hard as any other character, and his Attack Speed Bonus from Demacian Standard might make him viable for that then I think. In the end however it still leaves me back at sqaure one and kind of distraught about still not winning a single game with Jarvan IV.

I think what I'm going to try to do for further investigations on Jarvan is get rid of Trinity Force in favor of an Infinity Edge or Warmog's Armor, and probably get Atma's Impaler instead of Youmuu's Ghostblade. Possibly also replacing the Mercury's Treads with Berserker's Greaves for more Attack Speed too. In any case however, here are my results thus far with Jarvan which aren't the most positive things in the world.

So while my stats aren't the best and I hardly did any games with Jarvan, I still think if I could learn how to use him well he could be a fairly good Dominion Champion, I will update as I have more experience as him, or have found a item combination that would work well. Also on that note I don't doubt that he would be extremely good for the classic mode as all of his abilities would create pure havoc in a team fight while also buffing his own team. Alas, it's harder to take advantage of such havoc in Dominion or even end up in a situation where creating it would be possible.

Princes and Princesses

I haven't posted anything for somewhat of a long time and while I have been meaning to do so, I've had certain real life issues preventing me from doing much that was really worth writing about. However, now that I'm here and I'm in a fairly good mindset to start writing again I'll start off with a few small notes as usual.

The Prince of Demacia

Today after playing a few games with Sion mostly in Dominion and only one in the Classic mode with the goal of farming Influence Points to buy Nocturne and try him out, and also to get the limited edition Halloween “harrowing” skin, if I like playing him anyways but back onto the main topic; I decided I felt like trying one of the new champions in this week's rotation, and that ended up being Jarvan IV since many of the other free champions don't appeal to me that much. Honestly, I haven't really heard that many good things about Jarvan IV either, nor have I seen him perform that well in games, it is my understanding that he was apparently very strong but he went through a series of patch changes that brought his power level down quite a bit. So, while I won't be able to experience the popular Jarvan IV, I still can see how he plays currently. I've only done one game with him, deciding to skip Coop mode practice again to see how off-put I would be on a PvP Dominion match without knowing anything at all, and it turns the answer is “quite a bit”. I currently haven't played him enough to make any true statements about him yet, however I do know that one of his main CC combos which involves throwing his standard down and then charging to it, which in the process, knocks up all enemies that are in the way, is somewhat difficult to pull off, moreso than most champions with a skill shot that I've played, mainly because it is very difficult to get more than one champion in path before charging, although I somewhat wonder if I'm overestimating what my role is in a fight, and I should just go for knocking up one champion.

In any case I will be writing more about Jarvan IV possibly in a more indepth post about how he performs in dominion specifically and possibly in the classic mode too since both modes seem to be rather Jarvanless.

Yggdra Union

In other news, I've also been playing a Playstation Portable game called Yggdra Union which is a turn based strategy game designed by Sting. It has a very animeish art style to it, and it's graphics aren't amazing, although I haven't really played many PSP games at all and I don't really know if there's a standard for “amazing” graphics on any hand held system. It is also a port from a GBA game but from my research it has a few improvements such as replacing the old music with more “modern” sounding themes although make no mistake, while I haven't played the GBA version myself, I have compared the PSP and GBA soundtracks for a few of the scores in the game, and they do carry basically the same tone and even rhythm, but the PSP does things like changing the instruments used or even slightly changing the tune in a few of the tracks. It also has added a few characters, and tactics cards which kind of goes onto what I wanted to say next in a way, the actual gameplay.

The game play is a combination of a standard turn based strategy game like Fire Emblem as well as adding cards to it. The cards are called tactics cards and they determine how much damage you do to the enemy, how many spaces you can move for your entire team, what abilities you are able to execute, and what type of weapon a unit has to have to be able to use that ability. This all is a lot of information for just seemingly one aspect of the game, but the tactics cards are pretty much the only drastic difference from most similar games. You still take turns with your enemy, you move units one by one but unlike most games and as kind of mentioned slightly before, your units share movement spaces and the total number of movement spaces is determined by the card rather than the type of unit itself, this also limits battlefield mobility severely. Other than that however, there's also a weapon triangle a lot like in Fire Emblem except that it adds magic rods and bows into the triangle, and there are various landmarks on the battlefield that you can take advantage of such as visiting villages or simply a fort that when you fight on it, it gives you positional advantages. One last thing that I'll mention that it does add that I've never seen a game do before is the use of formations which lead into unions; these are essential that you learn early in the game which require units to be in certain positions from each other when initiating an attack, or defending from an engagement. There are only two formations even though I'm sure the developers wanted to go for something crazier than that, but in any case, the two formations are diagonal and cross, and the unit that is one who is first attacked or attacks is how the two formations are chosen from. From then on if an allied unit is either across or diagonal from the main unit, they will join that unit in combat, utilizing this is important for two reasons : one, that you can only attack one per turn, period, not once per unit like most games. The other reason is that if a unit is forced to take another round in battle due to one side having more units in their union than the other, that specific unit enters the battle at less strength, this allows you to weaken the enemy in a way.

So, while that sounds like a lot of things for one game, it isn't too hard to get into the swing of things. The real deterrence of the game is that it allows for almost no mistakes or else it will punish you in some form, in fact I have literally not gotten everything on a single level while at the same time knowing full well of everything that is on the level. The game also rarely forces you to choose between rewards to take in that fashion either, it simply presents the opportunities at times that unless you've played the map a considerable amount of times, or have leveled your units in a way in previous maps, you simply will miss it. Another way to put it is that the game is very anti-perfectionist, and even if you retry maps constantly, the game handles things in a somewhat random fashion where it won't be possible to have a guaranteed shot at everything even with the most perfect planning.

None of that is to say the game isn't fun however, I really enjoy the story although it seems remarkably close to the story of Fire Emblem : The Scared Stones, on the other hand I like the characters much more than most of the characters in the game, but I also liked characters in the previous Fire Emblem (The Blazing Sword) more than The Scared Stones as well. I will be talking more about the story in a later post, and probably more about the game as I go through it, but as of now I'm about 14 hours played, and uncountable times retried because of my perfectionist mindset which I want to get rid of.

Conclusion

That's about it for today's post, I will be trying to post more often as I do more things that are actually worth posting about hopefully, and I apologize for the lack of posts recently.

The Spartan

Pantheon was one of the characters that has been around in League of Legends for quite awhile, I remember him being around when I first tried the game out about a year ago or maybe a little longer than that. However he's one of the characters that I found interesting because a lot of the characters at the time seemed unique in their own way and then there's a completely random spartan looking guy amongst the portraits. It wasn't until today and last night that I actually started to try him out though, so without further ado, this is what I've deducted.

Unlike most champions I tried the testing phase out differently this time, rather than practice in the
Coop mode even though I feel like I should have still, I went straight to playing Blind Pick Dominion games. It was a completely new experience for me because not only did I have to figure out how to use his abilities even though I had glanced through them beforehand, but I also had to find out how to use them effectively. Luckily like most champions in the game his abilities weren't the most complex things to figure out, using them on the other hand was a different story.

First he has a passive that allows him to fully block an attack for every 4 spells and attacks that he does, the use of this I'm sure can be controlled by experienced Pantheon players to make him very deadly. However, as I found out, it doesn't block everything like I thought it would, instead it's limited to turret attacks and auto attacks. That doesn't diminish it's usefulness as he can effectively get rid a great amount of damage from people that focus on large hitting auto attacks such as Trynadamere or Vayne. This passive is also triggered by another ability called Aegis of Zeonia which allows Pantheon to leap a short distance towards his enemy and stun them for a second, doing minor damage, and it also immediately puts his passive shield up, letting him block the next attack. With how much Pantheon attacks and triggers the shield, it does block quite a bit of damage, however that is because Pantheon despite looking very intimidating and having a shield, is very squishy.

Like most squishy characters, he has the damage to make up for that instead of simply having damage reducing spells and CC spells. The other two skills that I didn't mention yet are Spear Shot which does quite a bit of base damage, and it has a full 100% attack damage modifier, allowing it to really start to shine when he gains more AD. The last one and his main attack for the most part is Heartseeker Strike, this is a aimed short cone attack that is channeled, it does 3 attacks with a good amount of AD modifiers as well as doing double damage to enemy champions, this is his main burst and it has a fairly short cool down, allowing him to back off if he so chooses to refresh it and burst again. It also has a secondary effect, allowing him to always perform a critical strike on targets that are under 15% with auto attacks, furthermore spear shot does more damage to enemies that are also within this health range, making Pantheon a very effective executioner.

So while all of these sound quite impressive, there are hidden draw backs of course. Pantheon isn't good at a single thing like most other melee champions are such as how Akali and Katarina have strong burst damage abilities, while Trynadamere and Master Yi are good auto attackers. This means he is at a considerable disadvantage constantly and the player must make up for that with a good item build that would allow him to have good auto-attack damage while also having high burst with his abilities. That is much harder to do in Dominion than it is in normal games because after doing a lot of both Classic, and Dominion, I can honestly say it's easier to get gold in Classic not only because matches last longer, but because last hitting minions is a much more abundant and reliable source of gold rather than the enhanced passive gold stream, and gold from getting kills or assists on champions. Furthermore, it is fairly rare to have a Dominion game where you are able to get more than 3 endgame items, even 2 is sometimes stretching it, and most champions such as Pantheon don't reach their full potential until they're able to have all 6 items. That is a overall disadvantage for everyone though of course, so in the end it could also work out to Pantheon's favor.

In any case, what I did for Pantheon's item build were a number of things different from the first few guides on Mobafire.

1. Berserker's Greaves
2. The Brutalizer
3. Trinity Force
4. Infinity Edge
5. Sanguine Blade
6. Youmuu's Ghost Blade
7. Atma's Impaler or Frozen Mallet

Honestly all of the items in my list seem to work fairly well with him, however the real key to making him effective I found out is prioritizing which items to get first regardless of it's cost because of the short duration of Dominion games. I believe Berserker's Greaves can also be changed out for either Mercery's Treads or Ionian Boots of Lucditiy for either CC reduction or Cooldown reduction allowing Pantheon to burst more. The Bloodthirster of the normal Classic mode is easily replaced by Sanguine Blade which only has 5 less AD and it's also somewhat cheaper, it's also much easier to use unlike the Bloodthrister because it doesn't require you to build stacks off killing things and it simply stacks off hitting things, of which pantheon will build up the maximum amount of stacks very quickly. The defensive item is somewhat iffy for me, as defense doesn't really seem to be much of a priority in Dominion at all as while there are death penalties they're fairly minor. In regards of defensive items however, I still wanted to get one that would improve Pantheon's offensive capabilities so that led me to either Atma's Impaler for armor and critical strike along with some extra AD from his health, or Frozen Mallet which is health, AD again, and a more reliable snare. On the other hand however, Trinity Force is pretty useful even though it's snare isn't a guaranteed effect like it is on Frozen Mallet, but with Trinity Force you do still have a snare meaning that having two snares that don't stack isn't the most effective thing around. Also of course, you could replace the defensive item with a situational defensive item which I probably would do anyway like getting Thornmail for auto attacking teams or Warmog's armor if you wanted more health, and so on.

So with all of this aside, Pantheon's performance on the battle field is quite impressive actually, he is able to cut most people up very fast with a Spear Shot, Aegis of Zeonia, and then Heartseeker Strike at the same time however, it's somewhat hard to make sure that people do stand in the Heartseeker Strike for it's full duration to get the most damage out of it, in fact most people will quickly move aside after their stun is over and it'll waste a few of the strikes. It also has a shorter cool down than Aegis of Zeonia and you'll be able to use it before your stun is back up so if you want to use it during that time, it has to be completely aimed without keeping anyone in place. After all of his attacks are done he can either back off or auto attack, and from what I've seen with a fairly strong auto attack build, pantheon is actually a decent auto attacker being able to stand up to other champions like Sion, and Wukong, and definitely able to stand up to other assassin characters like Akali as after the initial burst, they should be low on health anyway. As for backing off to wait for cooldowns, that can be much harder than it seems as Pantheon has no escape abilities other than simply running away, so in general, bursting hard first then finishing the enemy off with auto attacks or at least softening them up and surviving long enough for another round of burst is the way to go for pantheon, and in the end if you get someone to 15% or lower they're basically dead anyway because of his 100% chance to critical strike on enemies that low.

One last tactic that Pantheon can utilize is similar to Gangplank, he is able to use Spear Shot to poke and harass his enemies before going in for a full brunt melee. This is much more effective in Classic mode of course as for the most part all Dominion engagements are full brunt assaults but I did use the poke tactic with Spear Shot now and then.

So, in the end Pantheon is a fairly viable champion in Dominion but like all champions, requires some getting used to, I would say somewhat more than champions such as Jax or Master Yi.

  

LeBlanc

While playing League of Legends which of course is a team game with different character options that fit different “classes”, I have always been trying to find a few characters that I could focus on mastering which had different classes, but so far I haven't really found any at all even in my normal specialty of melee characters in most games. With that, as someone who likes melee in games, I especially found it even more difficult that I also want to choose a ranged character that I could be more proficient in as well as one that melees. I have played quite a few ranged champions from ranged carries like Tristana, Ashe, Miss Fortune, Corki, and Ezreal and Support champions such as Soraka or Karma, but only a few Mages. All of the mentioned characters I have tried in more than a few practice games and sometimes onto PvP matches but I have never really tried a Mage character more than once in a practice match until LeBlanc.

What drew me to LeBlanc is that I played against a player who was very good at her and it surprised me a great deal as I hardly ever see LeBlanc played at all, furthermore she was able to do quite literally insane burst damage, which is really the core of what intrigued me about her. As I found out, and experienced, LeBlanc is basically a glass cannon, she has extremely high burst that lets her take out most champions in only 2-3 spells and if they survive that, they're very very low on health, I really like burst damage in games, and while I personally played a Mage in World of Warcraft, and ended up not liking it, I still have an idea to give the characters who are masters of burst damage a chance in various games.

As usual I started off with a Coop practice game with Alice where we tried something kind of weird out and tried to lane together with her playing Cassopeia whom she has experience with, and me as LeBlanc who was completely new to me. We probably made it harder on our selves than it should be but it was a learning experience nevertheless, I quickly found out that LeBlanc's main attack, Sigil of Silence does quite a bit of damage, and it only gets better as she gains levels. I had trouble getting used to her blink at first as I've been playing characters where I would pretty much just hit all of the spells as soon as they came up and that “spamy” attitude was not that great when her blink also teleported me back to my original position if I hit it again within 3 seconds, which I did mistakenly more than once during the practice match. As with all skill shots, I found it difficult to aim her Ethereal Chains around minions, but when it did get off, it was pretty easy to stay within range of my afflicted target to trigger the immobilization effect and thus in most situations, resulting in a kill. Finally her damage output simply sky rockets when she gains her ultimate which mimics the last spell she casts and inflicts more damage based on the rank, using it after casting Sigil of Silence is her main burst and it's very effective, it simply decimates the enemy's health in most situations. I ended up not getting many kills but plenty of assists because I wasn't able to chain my spells together effectively enough which I learned later on, but again nevertheless, it was an enjoyable and relaxing experience.

So while practice was fun despite a few drawbacks, it made me like LeBlanc and try her out in Dominion. Like most champions I've been trying out recently, Dominion is a completely different game almost and it kind of shines in LeBlanc's favor and against her at the same time. The first thing I noticed and probably one of the bigger problems that I'm still trying to deal with is that Mejai's Soulstealer is not available in Dominion, that is very bad for LeBlanc as it is the highest base AP item before percentage modifiers around, and also in regards to money, it's also the cheapest and so far from what I've seen, there is no Dominion only equivalent. So, that led me to experiment with items which I've been trying to do for many characters anyway, I ended up with a buying order like this :

1. Sorcerer's Boots
2. Fiendish Codex
3. Morello's Evil Tome
4. Will of the Ancients
5. Rabadon's Deathcap
6. Zhonya's Hourglass
7. Archangel's Staff
8. Void Staff

I don't entirely know what the caps for magic resistance and magic penetration are yet, but for the most part I was just trying to get as much ability power as possible without spending that much money. I actually ended up changing the buying pattern to this :

1. Sorcerer's Boots
2. Fiendish Codex
3. Morello's Evil Tome
4. Rabadon's Deathcap (at which point the game usually ends, and I don't really have a solid build afterward however I usually end up doing something like this)
5. Void Staff
6. Sheen
7. Lichbane

I don't really know if Lichbane is worth it for LeBlanc yet and it's very difficult to tell what exactly is working or not while playing the game for me, however I read in a guide that it might “possibly” work, so I figured why not. Really the only thing I feel like I could change is having Archangel's staff sooner, maybe replacing Morello's Evil Tome or Void Staff with it. However, I need to have the most AP as soon as possible to be effective essentially so I feel like the third end item that I'll always get no matter what is Rabadon's Deathcap as it adds so much AP.

Onto the next thing about LeBlanc in Dominion however, as it is very close combat focused, you need to literally have very fast reflexes to use LeBlanc effectively as most champions can kill her just as fast as she can kill them, this point is lessened when you have group support as when you come in from behind other people, it lets you quickly burst a enemy down and make the fight that much easier for the rest of the team. On the note of using her effectively, as Dominion really forces you to adapt quickly it's great for learning how to use a champion in individual or small group combat situations. At first I was doing a lot of dumb mistakes that irritated me like using mimic on a spell I didn't want to because I was casting my spells frantically instead of precisely and it ended up doing things like copying my blink and having me blink into the enemy which got me killed very quickly. However, as I played more games I feel like now I can be a contributing force in a team and beat most champions in duels or small group fights. One more note on abilities, it is very easy to kite meleers in Dominion with the use of Ethereal Chains, and basically if you or they stay in range while the chains are on them, they'll die once the immobilization effect triggers as you'll be able to just turn around and burst them down quickly.

As for standard Dominion play I found that being a roamer at all times is the best strategy, while you “could” defend and you're actually very good at interrupting captures and escaping through the use of LeBlanc's blink, I personally didn't even have the survivability of a Ryze or a Kassadin who are both very squishy champions; so to defend nodes you have to be confident in beating 1v1s and also accept that you will die most of the time to a 1v2. That is what makes LeBlanc a ineffective defender, unless you're able to somehow kill a single champion quickly enough which will require all of your abilities, and not have their team mate assist on attacking you, you won't be able to defend yourself against a second person's onslaught even if the first person is blown apart. With that said, there is something that comes to mind that I haven't tried yet, which is using Flash instead of Ghost which will let you escape and have time for your cooldowns to recharge. So that's something for me to try out later. Regardless of that however, LeBlanc is amazing at offense pushes or roaming defense as you will hardly ever be the target when you arrive to a fight and even the split second of an element of surprise lets you get into the fray, quickly burst a target down, and escape which will turn most fights into your team's favor, and even if your team loses, you'll still be able to finish the enemy off most of the time.

Like Wukong I've only started playing LeBlanc today pretty much, and it's very interesting but also frustrating at times, I in general wonder about LeBlanc's viability in Dominion because while I pretty much got the most kills/assists on my team at all times, I was still unable to turn the tide into winning a lot of matches. I think I'll be doing a lot more experimenting with LeBlanc and possibly become better at her, I still don't know the exact cause of why my games weren't as successful as mine were when I played melee champions, my personal score wasn't ever horrendous, and I felt like I did good in all of my games personally, but the fact is that I had hardly any wins as LeBlanc compared to even Wukong and definitely compared to Jax and Trynadamere.

"Okay!" and Wukong

“Okay!”

Alright, I finally got around to finding a good image hosting service as I previously used Photobucket but they have a “viewed” limit where if you exceed a certain amount of views from visitors, it replaces your pictures everywhere they're shown at with a small box saying basically to upgrade to see it again. I originally was going to use Photobucket anyway but then that came to mind and for the purpose of the blog and my current funds, I've decided to look for an alternative. I found one (by Adam's suggestion) in Imgur which I never really considered as all I see from the site are joke pictures. Not to my surprise, right on the front it also claims that it has the funniest pictures on the internet. However, while I haven't posted a picture yet, I have uploaded a few that I will be trying to show here in someway after I finish writing this, and basically it gives the same options as Photobucket does at least the ones that I used frequently such as providing links to put the picture into various formats on the web, and of course allowing you to sort the pictures into different albums.

So in short, I'll be able to get a album up for the blog soon which will make things a lot more exciting.

Wukong - Nimbus Striker

Today I spent pretty much all of my time trying Wukong out and trying to figure out how he plays, his strengths and weaknesses, and in general to see how he performs in Dominion.

In a Coop game that I started out with like usual for all of my new champions, I thought that Wukong was pretty strong actually, he has very strong harassment abilities and he's able to escape quickly afterward. Last hitting was also very easy with Wukong as after about.. I'd say level 4-5 and definitely higher than that, he has more than enough mana for any of his spells, so you're able to easily use his main strike to aid in last hits on minions without any mana problems at all. So from the laning phase my impression was that Wukong is very strong, he actually even gets better in team fights where he actually becomes more armored and resistant as more enemy champions are around him, and his ult is a AoE knock up as well as heavy damage leading to you basically being able to give your entire team free hits while the enemies are in the air. In summary, Wukong is very good in the classic mode, however the main goal of my experimentation was to find out just how well that holds up in Dominion.

Dominion simply put, is where his usefulness diminishes. His burst damage is still very strong in the early and mid game phases, but he simply can't hold a candle up to Champions with high auto attack end game potential such as Trynadamere or Jax. That isn't to say that he isn't good however, I personally have beaten many Trynadamere and Jax players 1v1 on Dominion through the use of hit and runs, however both of those champions are also capable of multikilling players, Wukong is not unless all of the enemies are at low health.

Onto more positive news about Wukong though, his burst potential does still shine through out the game, and he'll be able to dispose of low armored people very easily as he can out maneuver them and close in quickly to do burst then escape, repeating the process afterward. He can also beat most meleers in small group combat as well, although it requires a lot more mobility than simply running in and attacking, Wukong will always need to use hit and run tactics to be effective in Dominion. The last positive thing is that today is only my first day of actually playing him so I'm very new to him and I don't really know him well enough to create a solid min-max build for him that would possibly put him on the same level as Trynadamere or Jax. While I was also playing Wukong, I saw people playing champions who I normally consider weak such as Shaco, Twitch, and Miss Fortune, and they basically turned them into killing machines that could easily out kill Jax (I also fought a Ashe who did the same thing as Jax, but I was able to get rid of her quickly, but still she hurt quite a bit) so, I suppose more experience is the only way to tell for certain, but for now, Wukong is kind of not exactly a “pick up and get a decent score” champion, at least in Dominion.

Here's a few of the results of the games I played with Wukong, I don't really know if it was me performing poorly individually, or the enemy team was simply outplaying my team, but the results aren't exactly the most positive things around, but all in all, I'm happy with how I did in most of the games.

So in the end, I guess only time will tell, it'll also tell if I want to keep playing Wukong myself or move onto another champion. He's pretty fun honestly, and the fun did override the difficulty for a little bit, but there's only so much of getting one shot that I can take.